LaserJets on Suns: Summary

[Jon Bragason]

In article <9576 at brazos.Rice.edu>  I wrote:
>
>I have a LaserJet III which I want to use on a Sun system.  Does anyone
>have experience with this setup?  I know of the following two wasy to do
>it: Use a postscript cartridge and run the printer as a PS printer or buy
>for $300 the printer support from Sun Consulting.  I would like to know if
>there is PD support for using a LaserJet with Suns.

The responses I got were all requests for my summary except the following.
This was the only helpful answer I got.  As a matter of fact we here at
School of Engineering at Florida International University have decided to
go the easy way and buy a $389 PostScript cartridge from Pacific Data for
our LaserJet III.  We have tested the cartridge from HP and that one works
fine also.  The printouts came out as fast if not  faster than from our
ScriptPrinter (LNO3 w/Postscript).  There is quite a lot of PD PostScript
support so that I guess is the easy way out.

Following is the only helpful reply I got:

If you haven't received help by now, let me give you a brief summary of
what we have here:

    - jetroff -- this is available for free but there is a
        more advanced commercial version.  It supports the HP LJ II
        so it should work with the III as well.
    - lcat -- some time ago lcat (a troff to LaseJet II filter) was posted
        in comp.sources.unix.  I have modified it so that it
        downloads fonts to the printer (instead of using
        graphics mode).  The fonts used are the ones in the /usr/vfont
        directory supplied with SunOs (you may have to look in the
        distribution tapes for them though).  I can send you this
        program but you should consider it a Beta version as I haven't
        had the chance to test it a lot.

    - groff -- the GNU troff  (I am not sure whether it supports the LJ III,
        but its free so you may want to have alook into it anyway.)
        Given the vector graphics abilities and the scalable fonts of
        the LJ III, it should be really easy to write a driver for it.
        I'd have done it already, but we only had a LJ III for a week
        here and then it was taken by another group (seems we are
        stuck with PostScript).

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